Main Page
If you ended up here, you must be seriously lost. This isn't The Last Page on the Web, but it's close.
That said if you’d like to hang around a while and see what’s here, feel free. But be warned, I’m pretty damn good at wasting time, my own as well as others. Without the burden of an editor, I often take far too many words to describe anything at all.
As this is, at least, the 27th version of a personal website for me. To be honest, I was around when it all started and you had to hand code everything. Since then, lots of tools have come and gone and I probably tried most of them. Several years ago I gave up writing the website by had and switched to using MediaWiki. It's the underlying engine for Wikipedia and proves a sufficiently robust content management system for my needs. It's not perfect, for instance hierarchical content is more difficult than it might be, but it's good enough and require nearly zero maintenance on my part since my hosting service automatically upgrades the core software and PHP as stable versions are released. they also back up the MySQL database daily which is nice. Not that I rest on that. I do a full backup myself and store it locally vaguely once a month or when I have added a lot of content.
This particular instance is a restart (begun Feb 2020) of the last attempt to use MediaWiki that imploded when my host updated PHP in some weird way that broke the site. It's original goal was to provide an online presence for my woodworking projects and my research into pre-industrial woodworking tools and furniture. And, it still does that but I've expanded the scope to hold more of my research material, web scrapings and other stuff.
It's a pain to maintain several different repositories of information and I used to keep everything in Evernote and Word and just use the site for "publishing", but I'm on the site everyday anyway (there are non-public pages), so why not move all that to here? Making it more accessible and available. Evernote recently (Dec 2020) released a completely new client and it sucks bad. Which is unfortunate since I've been a premium member for 10 years. It was one of the first services I thought was worth going premium and while it had it's warts, it's been fine. But now I am moving off of it. The new client doesn't have some features I find critical and unlike other features that are getting rebuilt in the new framework, my stuff won't be. So, Good Stuff, material that's stood the test of time will get moved here and the stuff I am actively researching or is low stakes is going into OneNote. It also have a few idiosyncrasies, but we use it at work and I have it via my home Office 365 and it allows me to work on notebooks from both accounts at the same time which is very nice.
You may recognize the site's mascot in the logo area. That's Hedda, my Siberian Husky, and constant companion. I have probably thousands of pictures (literally) of her and our other dogs Sasha and Rigo. You'll see more of them scattered about. She's a great dog and she calls shotgun every time.
I'm adding writing projects as I complete them or migrate them. I used to have a daily(ish) blog, Probably 3 or 4 actually. I've also restarted that. You can find it here. The better articles will get archived here when I get around to it.
